The invention relates to software application event collection systems.
Most software application event collection systems are "timer based," i.e., they collect data from an application program at specified time intervals. Because random parts of the application are executed at any given time, the actual frequency of events occurring in the collected data must be calculated as an average or estimated frequency. On the other hand, so-called "event based" evaluation systems gather data at specified locations in the application and thus collect and report on the actual frequency of events, not on an estimated frequency. Software debugging systems, for example, are one type of event based evaluation systems. In debugging systems, the application to be debugged is "instrumented" at points of interest with calls to service routines in another application which does the actual debugging. The points of interest are often referred to as "breakpoints" and include, for example, the beginnings and endings of subroutines. Each time the instrumented subroutine executes, the data related to the event is collected as part of the evaluation.